My favourite Tilapia joint in Tema

Today, let's talk about one of my favourite Tema food joints... Feel at Home Catering services.

Popularly known as Community 10 banku from its Community 10 location in Tema, it's a great joint for deliciously flavoured grilled tilapia and banku.

Location

So I know of two branches, not sure if there are more though. You get the same quality of food at both on most days so for me, I just prefer the one I'm closest to at any time.

Here's the Google link to the one at Community 10:
Feel At Home Tilapia Joint
https://goo.gl/maps/fvcUAtZwp2k

And here's a link to the Community 9 one:
https://goo.gl/maps/2cWmZZCDjEK2

The latter is a dropped pin so doesn't have an official Google name yet.

Alrydee!! Now you know where to go, let's move on to what you can expect... Ready? I am!

Ambience

It's ambience is pretty local, not big on fancy, but surely functional. Plastic tables that allow you to sit at a good height and sit up straight to eat if you wanted to.

The Community 9 location is pretty spacious compared to the Community 10 one by Monte Carlo. Often they both play loud music, usually at night. They're both also an open air environment and have fans in some places on the premises.

There's a TV screen at both places and they show pretty random stuff from music videos to old movies and football matches.

Opening hours

And they're open every day a week, from about 11am to 7ish pm when the food runs out... lol.

At a point, they weren't opening on Mondays. It was a sure heartbreaker then when you weren't aware or had forgotten that vital piece of info but made the trip to the place with high expectations. Only to find it closed in such a circumstance was devastating. I am personally glad and thankful Monday breaks are over. Thanks, guys!

Taste & Texture

This is my takeaway pack from today's purchase. It was 20 cedis and not my best shot yet... lol...

Now on to the food itself! The banku is small and makes good for a high protein meal. As you can see, the fish is the biggest single thing in the dish, even with this picture that the fish was relatively small to the average size you'd get. If you're lucky, and you're a lover of soft texture & rich flavour like me, you'd get one of their long-marinated tilapias that is soft and well seasoned throughout the fish. If you don't, don't worry. To make up for a less flavoured tilapia, just make sure you dip your piece of fish inside the pepper found within it before you savour it in your mouth. It surely does well to get back that rich flavour, and compensates me adequately on the texture I didn't get to have.

I love the veggies that they add. Makes you fuller especially if you share your meal here like me. I barely eat their ground pepper. It's good, but I just got hooked on to the pepper inside the fish some time back and use that instead to eat my banku. Why? It's cooked, one, because cooked pepper often sits better with me. Two, the fish juices infused in it make it a more tasty adventure than the raw ground pepper. However you like your banku with this fish, I hope you enjoy it as I do.

Cost

It currently costs between 20 to 27 cedis a plate depending on how big the day's fish are.

You may want to budget for a fizzy drink as well since the pepper can really put your tongue on fire most days, especially when you haven't had so much pepper in a while. That ranges from 2 cedis to 5 cedis the last time I checked. So if you're buying a takeaway pack, maybe you may want to buy your drink on your way to your final eating destination, wherever that may be *imitating an air hostess voice.... lol*. They often sell glass-bottled fizzy drinks so that's another motivator to buy your drink outside the premises if saving a few coins isn't.

They never charge extra on takeaway packs so that's good if you're tight on your budget but still want to eat somewhere else. I know some eateries do.

Service

Well, it isn't a five star restaurant so don't expect white shirt waiters in bow ties... lol... 

The ladies who serve are often respectful and decent. 

Remember you may need to give them money before you're served. More especially if you're taking it away or just want to ensure you order isn't forgotten on a busy day. Which honestly can happen. 

Take note of the lady you give your order to, it may come in handy if your order delays. You should probably get your food in 10mins on a good day, and up to 25minutes on a busy day. Busy days include they preparing a huge order for events so it's not always equal to the number of people you meet there.

Most of the time, they're in some uniform or the other so it's kinda easy to tell who works there. 

You're given a bowl of water and soap to wash your hands when you eat there. And if there's no ketchup on your table and you want some, just ask, they'll get you one since it's not served as part of the meal. I find ketchup reduces the peppery effect.

Other thoughts

I used to love eating there a lot. So a tip, do wear trousers if you're planning to go there at night or sit in the sandy portions even during the day... mosquitoes and sandflies have the power to make your experience less enjoyable. Now, I just love to carry it home.

So anyway you want it, do make a stop at Feel at Home at Community 10 or Community 9 next time in you're in the area. Don't forget to let us know what you think of it in the comments below!


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Apple pie!

Hello!

Great to have you back here reading again (or if it's your first time here, my warm welcome to you 😊 ). It has been ages, right before our last post though, I so agree. (We started composing this one before the previous one.) Forgive the unintentional suspense once more; I hope our subsequent posts will be compensatory enough.

This was our first bake off. Don't have pictures from our second. #sadface

When we had our last bake off in February right before I left SA, I promised Doro my next post would be about our famous apple pie. We're in May, and a whole lot has happened since then. But jDoro, I never forgot my promise. So I specially dedicate this post to my biggest apple pie enthusiast, *drumroll* Doro!!!

Doro's on the far left, and I'm second from the right

As usual, I'll share the links to the recipes I used and then my hacks. A gentle reminder to us all, I'm a proud newbie to this baking stuff and love to try new things. Aside helping my mum before she stopped baking when I was much younger and a few baking episodes with friends, I'm as new as it gets. So I'm absolutely glad you're reading and hopefully baking with us. But I digress again, back to the apple pie...

So our apple pie recipe is a bit funny 'cos we got our perfect combo from different sites. Plus they're different little stories that go with it... including our almost messed up crust which I talk about a bit in the Crust section below. And my all time favourite jist: that no one really wanted to work on it during our first bake off but it actually became the favourite baked treat we had that day... lol... So Doro eventually did most of the work that day, I must say. It's a lot of work, especially peeling all those apples but surely awesomely rewarding when it's out of the oven. #allsmiles

The Filling 

We got the filling ingredients from this Betty Crocker page.  To be absolutely honest, we simply enjoyed the extra Zang we got from adding lemon juice, and because that made our filling a bit runny, this is how we changed the ingredients:

• 1/2 cup of All purpose flour
• 4 tablespoons of butter
• 1/4 - 1/2 cup of Lemon Juice

And we followed the following steps:

1. Peeled and cored the apples, and then cut them in 8 or 12 segments depending on the size of each apple (that's half of each quarter or a third of each quarter)
2. We melted the butter and the sugar in a pan at high heat and stirred till we noticed a consistent mixture
3. Added the apples at this point
4. Then added the flour
5. And then finished off with the lemon juice. 

The trick is to make the filling taste very Zangy whilst on the stove because it tastes less acidic when it cools off and loses more Zang in its taste when the baking is done.

The Crust

Whilst the filling cooled off we made the crust from scratch using this recipe from this SimpleBites page. I must confess when we began to make the dough in our very first Bake Off, we did not estimate we needed freezing. I think because we ignored that instruction, our dough began to 'melt' after a while. So after working the dough according to the other steps, we added another cup of flour when we were rolling it out before lining our baking moulds. We kept sprinkling the flour bit by bit on our rolling surface till the dough absorbed it all and it felt firmer.

With our baking moulds lined with the dough, we distributed our filling and created incisions on the coverings. These incisions were made so there would be space for the pie to let out steam. So definitely, tarts and meshed coverings didn't need them. If there's no room for the pie to breathe, depending on how much space your filling takes up, you could have a messy pie from the filling bursting/oozing out from any weak portions of the crust.

We popped our pies in the preheated oven and let it bake for 30mins at 180°C. Basically we were cooking the dough since the filling was well done. And voila! Our lovely Apple pies were ready!

Lovely, warm, sweet, beautifully zangy, and a pleasant crust, a bon appetit to you when you finally try it out. And a special thanks to Doro, without you, this post may not have seen the light of day (especially since it took me about a month to finally complete it.... lol)

I hope once more you enjoyed my hacks and they are useful to your baking experience... and make you feel like a baking champion when you get all those compliments!!!

For the day you bake again (or for the first time), we, at Ndudu tales, wish you a Happy Baking Experience!

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